We have asked our blogger community to answer a few blogging questions about themselves, with the aim of getting to know them and their blogs a little better. These will be published as a series of blog posts, which we hope will make interesting reading. Carry on reading if you’d like to find out more about the bloggers who are active on Bloggers Required. You can view other blogger Q&As here, and you can complete your own here.

SillySilberman was founded late December of 2012. Originally starting out as a strict ‘Fashion & Beauty’ blog, I started to realize shortly down the line that Fashion & Beauty wasn’t really my thing. So I took 3 three weeks to myself and gathered all my thoughts and re-branded the entire blog about 7 months into the life of the blog.

Re-branding was the correct choice for me, looking at the outcome. SillySilberman is now a self branded, ‘Lifestyle & More’ blog. Featuring all things Lifestyle, daily struggles of being a Transgender at such a young age, reviews, encouraging posts, and much more.

Q1. How and why did you get into blogging?

How I got started into blogging is actually a funny story. I was using some ‘blogging’ site that gave you points for each post you made, you could redeem them for real items that get shipped to you. I joined this website that was very similar to Pinterest, but it was directed towards buying items, not ‘all over the place’ life Pinterest is where you can ‘pin’ ideas, and d.i.y.’s.

I made a post about the site including 5 interestingly cool things I found browsing the site. A week later I was contacted by the PR Marketing Team from that very company asking me to partner with them, and join the team of the company. I got to have my name placed in the ‘Partners’ section along with the PR Blogging Team they had.

I created a legit blog (hosted by Blogger), and the blogging adventure began. For the curious, I am in fact still in partnership with that very company to this day.

Q2. Where do you get your writing inspiration from?

I get my writing inspiration from many things. I’m not going to sugar-coat the truth, I don’t have inspiration 60% of the time. I usually browse ‘Blogging ideas’ posts, or just take a look at some of my favorite bloggers and see some of the topics that they are posting about lately.

Some of my rants or ‘venting’ posts gain the most traffic through out my entire blog.

Q3. If you could offer some words of encouragement to a newbie or frustrated blogger, what would they be?

Don’t listen to what everyone else says. You don’t NEED to have a niche’ to be a successful blogger. You don’t NEED to blog everyday to be noticed. Just be patient and write (type) from your heart. Do what you feel will make yourself the best blogger. Every blogger is different.

Q4. What has changed most about blogging culture/the blogging industry since you started?

Jealousy. Since my blog started to get tons more attention, I noticed the hate comments and jealous comments start rolling in from fellow bloggers from some of the Blogger Networks I’m apart of. I feel that there is a lot of jealously in the world of blogging. It always seems like a competition of who can get the most pitches done in a week or how many products they can receive for review from brands. It’s not all about that.

Q5. What daily tools and platforms do you use in your blogging routine, for research, promotion, sharing and other?

I typically just stick to the traditional. Publish my posts which automatically get published to Google +, and then simply mention the newly published post on Twitter and Facebook.

Q6. Do you understand your blog analytics, and how important do you think they are? Please share some best practice.

I’m not completely aware of the extent that blog analytics can provide you, but I know the basics. How important do I think they are? Depends on the blogger. I personally use some of the stats my analytics show in my Blogger Media Kit, some could care less.

Q7. Where do you hope blogging will take you in the future?

I can’t answer that right now. I have no clue. Over the 10 months of having a blog, I have made 4 amazing partnerships with huge companies, and landed an immaculate amount of short-term company partnering.

The cold hard truth of it all is SillySilberman could either crash and burn, or take on new heights I never thought would be achievable.

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